SPLEEN is the personal blog of Stephen Judd

All posts tagged "pr"

I am on Twitter. I follow people on Twitter. Recently, some of them tweeted things about a Neat New Product (NNP), and I was cross about it, and they were puzzled and perhaps hurt that I was cross. Let me try and explain.

For me, commercial interactions are just one kind of social interaction. Some are highly enjoyable. For example, I like having a yak with my landlords, I enjoy bantering with retailers at my favourite shops, or having a yarn with a stall holder at a market. There are some people like hairdressers and bar staff where this is arguably part of the service.

When I interact like that that it’s pretty obvious what the nature of our relationship is from the outset, and that commercial concerns are colouring our exchange somewhat. So I'm fine with that. I don't hate commerce per se, and I like people, and we're all clear what our roles are.

But it's upsetting when there is a bait and switch, or if I haven’t chosen to engage or initiate. Who doesn’t hate telephone sales calls or charity street collectors, faking a normal human interaction and counting on your social conditioning about how exchange of greetings goes? HELLO MR JUDD, ARE YOU HAVING A GOOD EVENING? It’s deceptive, exploitative somehow.

Deception is also at the heart of some PR techniques. This goes right back to Bernays and his campaigns to normalise smoking for women, or get the US public to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. PR weasels make things seem like authentic news events, spontaneously arising, that in fact are the product of PR efforts, trying to shape my perception of reality for money. When I figure it out, it annoys me. It’s hard enough to understand what’s really happening without people lying about it to confuse things further.

I use Twitter heavily. I have some loose criteria for following Twitter accounts. I don’t follow celebrities. I don’t follow companies or brands, except when I need a back channel to solve problems (so I follow Kiwibank but not Whittakers). I follow official accounts of libraries and city councils and bus services for notices. I follow people I know, and people I think I would like to know, and that’s about it. Yes there are some politicians and journalists there, but mostly they followed me first, or I knew them anyway. For me Twitter is a space with the character of a continuing conversation or banter, interspersed with the odd useful nugget. Commercial interests might want to exploit it as another medium to interact with customers, but I don't have to follow their accounts, and I don't.

My aversion to commercial messages on Twitter is part of a broader defence against intrusion into my head by people who want to grab my attention to sell something. There are few if any public spaces left where this isn't a problem and I treasure them. I have unwanted calls on my attention most of the goddamned time -- there are even ads trying to catch my eye when I piss in a pub urinal these days -- and I resent the effort it takes to stake out my own mental space.

So now I can explain why I found the NNP tweets so irritating. As far as I know, selected people were gifted some NNP in the hope that they would tweet about it. And they did. (This is to be expected: many marketing techniques are based on the primal human instinct to reciprocate. Some nice monkey does something for you, and even if you didn’t ask them to do it for you, you’re a nice monkey too so you do something for them in return.This is why corporate gifts are a thing. Oh there’s no obligation, but they work anyway.)

The NNP tweets from freebie-recipients are commercial messages in my little marketing-free bubble -- ultimately placed there because the NNP proprietor paid for them to be there -- and they have the flavour of the bait and switch, in that I thought I was following a normal conversation and a pitch for a product got injected. I find both those things irritating. I thought I had a mutual, equal relationship with the real people on Twitter where we had a conversation going, and instead, PR people have been repaid for their gift with my attention. My precious attention that I jealously guard from the evil forces of consumerism. (I am indebted to Giovanni Tiso for expressing this idea properly.)

I’m not saying that you’re a bad person if you did this. I’m just saying I’m irritated by the thing you did. Maybe you don’t share the same view of our relationship. That’s ok, go ahead. But now I have to re-evaluate our relationship. I thought we had something special, but it turns out maybe it’s for sale. Quite possibly part of our mutual hurt feelings is that you were just doing something nice for the PR monkeys -- and you were, your good nature came into play here. It just wasn't nice for me.

NB: if you tweeted about the NNP because you actually spontaneously purchased it and think it’s awesome, I have no beef with you.